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[XXI.1.]
and the glittering illusion about the nature of wealth, blinded by sensual
appearances, is confronted by the working, sober, prosaic, economical
industrialist who is quite enlightened about the nature of wealth,
and who, while providing a wider sphere for the other's self-indulgence
and paying fulsome flatteries to him in his products (for his products
are just so many base compliments to the appetites of the spendthrift),
knows how to appropriate for himself in the only useful way the other's
waning power. If, therefore, industrial wealth appears at first to be
the result of extravagant, fantastic wealth, yet its motion, the motion
inherent in it, ousts the latter also in an active way. For the fall in
the rate of interest is a necessary consequence and result of industrial
development. The extravagant rentier's means therefore dwindle day by
day in inverse proportion to the increasing possibilities and pitfalls
of pleasure. Consequently, he must either consume his capital, thus ruining
himself, or must become an industrial capitalist.... On the other hand,
there is a direct, constant rise in the rent of land as a result
of the course of industrial development; nevertheless, as we have already
seen, there must come a time when landed property, like every other kind
of property, is bound to fall within the category of profitably self-reproducing
capitals - and this in fact results from the same industrial development.
Thus the squandering landowner, too, must either consume his capital,
and thus be ruined, or himself become the farmer of his own estate - an
agricultural industrialist.
The diminution in the interest on money, which Proudhon regards as the
annulling of capital and as a tendency to socialise capital, is therefore
in fact rather only a symptom of the total victory of working capital
over squandering wealth - i.e., the transformation of all private property
into industrial capital. It is a total victory of private property over
all those of its qualities which are still in appearance human,
and the complete subjection of the owner of private property to the essence
of private property - labour.
[XXII.1.]
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[XXI.2.]
To be sure, the industrial capitalist also takes his pleasures. He does
not by any means return to the unnatural simplicity of need; but his pleasure
is only a side-issue--recreation--something subordinated to production;
at the same time it is a calculated and, therefore, itself an economical
pleasure. For he debits it to his capital's expense account,
and what is squandered on his pleasure must therefore amount to no more
than will be replaced with profit through the reproduction of capital.
Pleasure is therefore subsumed under capital, and the pleasure-taking
individual under the capital-accumulating individual, whilst formerly
the contrary was the case. The decrease in the interest rate is therefore
a symptom of the annulment of capital only inasmuch as it is a symptom
of the growing domination of capital--of the estrangement which is growing
and therefore hastening to its annulment. This is indeed the only way
in which that which exists affirms its opposite.>
The quarrel between the political economists about luxury and thrift is,
therefore, only the quarrel between that political economy which has achieved
clarity about the nature of wealth, and that political economy which is
still afflicted with romantic, anti-industrial memories. Neither side,
however, knows how to reduce the subject of the controversy to its simple
terms, and neither therefore can make short work of the other.
[see also page
XXXIV GT.]
[XXII.2.]
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